Levi Palmer and Matthew Harding are prime movers in the now fully emerged womenswear school of applying nontraditional techniques to traditional men’s shirting and other complementary menswear tropes. Yet, as more and more designers try on a several-sleeved shirt for size—and how many sliced-and-diced menswear jackets have we seen in London this season?—they must develop the span of their oeuvre to stay ahead of the pack. To a degree, this collection fulfilled that imperative for newness while retaining a mastery of familiar ground.

They talked about the power of memory and Rauschenberg’s Combines in the press release. You could certainly see the memory of prosaic (but high quality) template garments—shirts, jackets, macs—in the riot of artistic distortion on their runway. This season, they added rope and drawstring to their arsenal of fastenings, cinching off-kilter hemlines and rucking asymmetric hems. Layered wide-mesh knits added further filters to their disjointedly dynamic silhouettes. They used copper buttons and metal trims on reversed fabrics to evoke the spirit of instinctive assemblage and deployed a color palette also drawn from Rauschenberg. There is a joy to the abundance of these designers’ capacity for creative reconstruction, and if sometimes their twisted balcony-like collars, their appendix sleeves, and their counter-intuitive layering fries the eye a little, further scrutiny tends to be rewarded with harmony.